As marketing becomes more and more of a digital knowledge work profession through the introduction of new channels and platforms, it is also starting to experience more of the process pain points that traditional software developers experienced in the late 90s. Delayed releases, generating waste in the process, limited visibility, and challenges in prioritization plague most Waterfall internal marketing departments and marketing agencies.

58% of marketing initiatives take more than 6 months to market, with the average at just over 8 months (McKinsey). Just midsize – large B2B organizations waste $958 million a year on inefficient and ineffective content marketing spend (Kapost + Gleanster) and, strikingly, 73% of marketers find it difficult to complete their work due to interruptions (Marketer Happiness Report).

According to the annual State of Agile Marketing Report 2022, most marketing teams use a hybrid approach that combines practices from Scrum and Kanban to practice agility and mitigate their process wastes. The practices from Kanban being leveraged among marketers for best results are visualized workflows, WIP limits, explicit policies, and measuring flow using throughput and cycle time.

Kanban Zone supports marketers in applying these proven techniques out of the box. By building a team-level to-do list and illustrating the process phases their work needs to go through, marketers are able to manage their tasks easily on a visual Kanban board in a manner of seconds.

Work-in-progress limits at each workflow stage in Kanban Zone allow marketers to create a stricter focus on a smaller subset of the work at a time by adding a maximum on their active columns, like In Progress.

By documenting Explicit Policies directly on the digital board marketers can define ground rules that govern their teams. Typical explicit policies for marketers tend to be Definition of Done, Definition of Ready, Review Processes, and Incorporating External Requests.

As far as process metrics are concerned, marketers prefer to measure their pace and output using throughput and cycle time. Throughput reflects the number of tasks that get completed within a fixed amount of time. It’s basically the sum of all parts. Cycle time is a customer-centered view of the time the team spends to deliver results. In any Kanban Zone template, cycle time and throughput are measured automatically, so the teams can focus on doing great work and checking on their process data during retrospectives.

Use the template for Kanban Marketing Agencies shown above to structure all of the client work in your Kanban marketing agency on one board. With this board set up, you can plan and manage all of your ongoing work as well as house additional resources you need to get your client projects Done.

WIP limits are applied to the “In Progress” and “Internal Review” columns, where the team has the most control. Labels on the cards can signify priority as well or how task cards ladder up to larger client campaigns depending on your context. The team’s backlog area is split into this week’s emergent work, where each client has their own area. Depending on the number of clients you’re working with, this area may be larger or smaller for your team. The general backlog is a wonderful place to build a repository of your great ideas and discover synergies between your clients.

Use the calendar feature to track important milestones and due dates and the metrics options to monitor the overall health of your team. Keep a special eye on cycle time as a measure of the pace of your team’s delivery from the customer’s perspective.

Card templates in the Kanban board template allow you to quickly create new activities related to Research, Advertising and Content with their relevant recurring checklists and pieces of their descriptions. 

For additional instructions on how to set up this board for your own team, read through the board instructions in the dedicated card in the backlog.

If you’re an internal marketing team, solely dedicated to marketing for one business, your board may be simpler than an agency, so you will also find in Kanban Zone another template for Internal Cross-functional Kanban Marketing teams.

Although this workflow layout and its features are also effective for the agency environment, using Blocking of cards can be crucial for a fast-paced internal team. Waiting on 3rd party might also be a column an internal team might choose to visualize on their board in order to keep an eye on the accumulations of items in the queue, aiming to influence it when possible.